A half-dozen original musicals in a little more than 15 years may not sound like a staggering achievement — or a virulent outbreak, depending on your taste — but Mr. Wildhorn’s Broadway output is unmatched by any other composer in the same period. This, even though not one of his shows turned a profit during its Broadway engagement. (To be fair, few shows do.)

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that, just as weeds will crop up wherever lawns are laid, Wildhorn musicals are an inevitable part of the wildlife of Broadway, where even more noxious flora appear with some regularity. So let us give a warm welcome back — or maybe just a shrug, a sigh and a tip of the bowler hat — to the return of “Jekyll & Hyde,” the Victorian-gothic pop-opera that started it all.

The revival that opened on Thursday night at the Marquis Theater, directed and choreographed by Jeff Calhoun, will no doubt stir passionate excitement among the show’s many fans. Although the original “Jekyll & Hyde” didn’t make money, the production played more than 1,500 performances and spawned flocks of obsessive acolytes, known as “Jekkies.”

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Constantine Maroulis making the transformation from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde in a revival of Frank Wildhorn’s musical at the Marquis Theater.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

These rabid fans will surely be soon convening at watering holes around the theater district to debate the urgent questions the new production raises. Does Constantine Maroulis, the former “American Idol” contestant who won a Tony nomination for his role as the headbanging hero of “Rock of Ages,” have the vocal chops to meet the murderous tessitura of the title role(s)? Does Deborah Cox, best known as a disco diva whose biography notes that she has had 11 No. 1 songs on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play chart, possess the acting talent to portray the hooker with lungs of steel to match her heart of gold? (Linda Eder, Mr. Wildhorn’s wife at the time, played the role in the first version.)

And does the addition of elaborate digital video enhance or detract from the dramatic intensity of the climactic “Confrontation” number, in which the good doctor performs a duet with his own bad self?

I hardly know where to begin in addressing matters of such moment. Let us take them one by one, shall we?

Yes, Mr. Maroulis meets the throat-thrashing challenges of Mr. Wildhorn’s score with aplomb, his high-reaching pop tenor evincing little strain when rising to the piercing climaxes. I was also impressed by Mr. Maroulis’s quietly intense performance as the obsessive Dr. Jekyll, whose quest to unlock the secrets of the divided human psyche have such unfortunate consequences for his mental hygiene, not to mention his hairdo. (When the potion he has devised unleashes the devil within, Mr. Hyde’s first nefarious act is to undo his tidy ponytail and begin flinging his dark locks around as if they were deadly weapons.)

Ms. Cox looks fetching in the naughty Victorian lingerie worn at all hours by the ill-fated Lucy Harris, the prostitute who finds an unfortunately passive protector in the noble Dr. Jekyll and a still more unfortunately aggressive abuser in his bloodthirsty alter ego. Statuesque and beautiful, Ms. Cox brings a suffering dignity to this cliché in corsets. More important for those who have come to hear a pop diva do what pop divas do best, her dark, lustrous voice does nice justice to her character’s signature song, the power ballad “Someone Like You.” (Both Mr. Maroulis and Ms. Cox have a tendency to drift downstage center when putting across their big numbers, as if performing in an arena, but the songs naturally invite this kind of treatment.)

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Deborah Cox, far left, in "Jekyll & Hyde."CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

As for that tense climax, in which Dr. Jekyll attempts to forever do away with his other persona (“Damn you, Hyde, set me free!”), and Mr. Hyde makes clear he will not go gently into that good night (“Can’t you see, you are me!”), I register no objections to allowing Mr. Maroulis to give his voice a rest by having the evil Hyde appear (via video) as a flame-haloed, glowering devil in a giant mirror, his half of the duet having been prerecorded.

If anything, this innovation reduces the campy histrionics of having the same actor engage in a singing duel to the death with himself. (In the original, Robert Cuccioli flicked the switch between personas by flinging his own ample tresses from side to side. A quick YouTube trawl brought forth a priceless, speeded-up version of David Hasselhoff performing the song in this style, sounding like a crazed chipmunk.)

Unfortunately there’s no way to digitally airbrush away the hokum that pervades the whole show, like the ample stage smoke puffing away throughout the proceedings, giving a most commendable featured performance as the fabled pea-soupy London fog. The actors portraying the sniveling or snobbish enemies of Dr. Jekyll all perform their chores with flavorsome relish, and Teal Wicks, as his ladylike love interest Emma Carew, suffers with noble fortitude as her hopes for happy matrimony begin to grow dim indeed.

Mr. Wildhorn’s score is probably his most appealing, as it mixes equal parts Hammer horror, Andrew Lloyd Webber-style pseudo-operatics and adult-contemporary-radio anthems. I’ll cop to a happy goosepimple or two as Mr. Maroulis and Ms. Cox let loose during their impassioned solo songs. The music’s mixture of styles — there’s even a bit of “Carmina Burana”-type shrieking tossed in for good measure — does make for a bizarre combination, but the variations are somewhat smoothed over by the unyielding stream of banalities in the lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, who also wrote the book.

A cursory reading of the libretto gives rise to yet another urgent question. Do the clichés in the lyrics outnumber the exclamation points, or vice versa? But I’m afraid I’d rather leave that one to those with a deeper interest in textual analysis of Frank Wildhorn musicals.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C12 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Just as if This Man Never Left, Either One of Him. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe